Are you one of those CRZD fans who wanted to have the ‘in’ thing and bought the sleek Motorola Razr V3 cell phone for $500 almost two years ago? I got news for you buddy; now you can get it for about $30 with a two-year service contract. Motorola has suffered dearly and so has the RAZR’s pricing. With profits looking down it has announced plans last month to lay off 3,500 workers. In a bid to make the company do better than the 30% dip it experienced in the stock market (since last October), billionaire investor Carl Icahn, bought 40 million shares last week. Learning the hard way, Motorola has now realized that besides microchips, screen size and data speed consumers want fashionable pieces too. People are in a trend of replacing their phones once every two years, rendering the older ones obsolete. The point behind such a moves is whether your piece has become your peer’s envy! These days everyone wants to be the trendsetter; they don’t want to be a part of the crowd. That’s why when Robert Brunner, a designer in San Francisco, bought a Razr when it first came out; he noticed that others did, too. "I started being one of six people at the meeting with a Razr," he said. "It went pretty quickly from a coveted object to a commodity-design thing."

Motorola has been coming out what many analysts and consumers see as mere Razr replicas, they simply have hyped up the names like the Pebl, Slvr, Rizr and Rokr. None of them have sold particularly well. Still to perfect their styling, even though they came out with the Krzr. But since it had similar looks to the RAZR, its features like digital music, 2 megapixel photos and access to broadband wireless networks could not woo the customers. At $199 with a two-year contract, no one was looking at it. To sum it all up: "Phone manufacturers are only as hot as their last major hit," said Carmi Levy, senior research analyst for Info- Tech Research Group. "Motorola failed to follow it up with something similarly as big as the Razr."
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